Excerpt:
In a provocative new book, Genevieve Guenther argues that too many conversations are happening on the fossil fuel industry’s terms.
Talking about climate change doesn’t come naturally to most people, even those who are worried about it. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report discussing it with family and friends “rarely” or “never,” a survey found last fall. They might be intimidated by the science, nervous about starting an argument, or afraid of being a Debbie Downer. The resulting silence is part of why there’s not more social pressure to reduce fossil fuel emissions: People dramatically underestimate public support for climate policies, because that’s the cue they’re getting from those around them. The only way to break this cycle, communication experts have said for many years, is to please, please, start talking about it.
But a recently published book makes the case that not just any kind of talking is good; anything that resembles the phrasing of fossil fuel propaganda, even unwittingly, undermines what should be the central goal of reducing emissions. In The Language of Climate Politics, Genevieve Guenther, a former Renaissance scholar turned climate activist, writes that fossil fuel talking points have weaseled their way into becoming the “common-sense position,” espoused not just by the right, but also by the left.
Guenther founded the New York City-based volunteer group End Climate Silence in 2018, in the hopes of provoking the media into talking more about climate change. The common-sense philosophy behind her work is that words shape ideas, and ideas have consequences, so we should rethink the words we use. “To secure a livable future, one thing we will need to do is dismantle and reframe the terms dominating the language of climate politics,” Guenther writes.
Her book lays out six key terms that she believes command the conversation, to the detriment of climate action: alarmist, costs, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience. These words are often used to prop up fossil fuels: by accusing people who speak out about the risks as overly alarmed, by pitting climate action against economic prosperity, by deflecting attention away from the U.S. and onto other countries, and by protecting the status quo by pointing to carbon removal technologies and societies’ ability to bounce back. The book seeks to debunk these points of view, smartly documenting, for example, how economic models failed to account for the true costs of climate change for so long.
For each term, Guenther offers substitute arguments that “will be hard for fossil fuel interests to appropriate.” Don’t talk about “resilience,” she says, because it implies people can tough out extreme weather; talk about “transformation” instead. The result is a binary approach that suggests there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about the climate. This quest for black-and-white moral clarity risks antagonizing potential allies — such as the climate-concerned folks who think that carbon removal has promise or advocates who worry that a message could backfire if it sounds too scary, not to mention younger Republicans, two-thirds of whom favor prioritizing renewable energy over expanding fossil fuels. But that’s a risk Guenther is willing to take…
